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Monday, February 24, 2014

Off With Their Heads

I have a lot of band shirts, pretty much all of them punk bands. I think this is the first band shirt I've owned that really captures my opinion on cats (outdoor), which makes it a pretty good birding shirt too. A lot of birders and biologists consider the outdoor cat to be a kind of Antichrist, and for good reason.

The negative impacts that outdoor cats have on wildlife (and now humans) continue to amaze me. A parasite found in domestic cats, Toxoplasma gondii, is now carried by Beluga whales in the fucking arctic! This is the same organism that is found to cause dramatic memory loss in human beings, whom typically contract it as a result of environmental contamination via cat feces. Many human carriers have no symptoms, but those that do may end up with serious psychological disturbances. And of course, there are the billions (literally) of wild animals that cats kill in the United States alone, every year, which is such brutal knowledge that its hard to fully comprehend. When will it end? Every year science shows us, in new and awful ways, how irresponsible and callous it is to allow cats to roam freely. Oh, and any pregnant mom infected with Toxoplasmosis can give it to their fetus too, which is just great.

Prudence the Cat lives indoors. She is a good kitty. She sleeps a lot and watches me read about marsupials that have sex until they die...which is a weird thing to admit, but birders get up to weirder things, I assure you.

Right. Prudence will never get her ass kicked by a stray cat again, and will never get hit by a car. Life is good for the indoor cat, remember that!